The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [66]
Outside the Reichstag, where German troops had made a last stand on 30 April 1945, Kuchumov scooped up some charred masonry from the ground and could not help but smile: 'who could resist a small souvenir of the evil of fascism from this city broken into smithereens?'
Kuchumov visited all four sectors of Berlin: American, British, French and Soviet. In the British-controlled Tiergarten, when the portly curator, still in his not-so-new black suit, witnessed the sprawling side-show of whores and touts, con men and fences, most of them wearing an array of military uniforms, he was filled with a deep sense of revulsion. 'It is enough for me to smell the rottenness of the bourgeoisie that is so foreign to the heart and soul of every Russian man,' he wrote. It was an aside that was surely written for any of those charged with implementing Comrade Zhdanov's new campaign, who might (accidentally) peruse this log.
Exhausted, Kuchumov caught a lift to Berlin-Karlshorst through the khaki traffic jam of jeeps and trucks, to where the Soviet Military Administration was now based. 'It was the only place that seemed in any kind of order,' he wrote. Anyone reading Kuchumov's account would believe that he kept only Soviet company, shunning contamination by the West. The next day he moved into the Berlin-Karlshorst district and was immediately called to a meeting. This was to be the first time he saw the general.
General Leonid Ivanovich Zorin, head of the Department of Reparations and Supplies, supervised the tracking and return of Soviet art works plundered by the Nazis. He had a small team of Soviet experts working for him, one of whom Kuchumov might have known by sight, Comrade Xenia Agarfornova, a curator from the Hermitage in Leningrad.
General Zorin gave Kuchumov his orders. His report from Konigsberg had been received warmly. The evidence - that the Amber Room had survived the fall of Konigsberg and might be concealed elsewhere - was compelling. The Committee of Arts of the Council of Ministers of the USSR had been deluged with replies to Kuchumov's appeal for help published in Vo Slavu Rodini. So he was to continue with his Amber Room investigation as a matter of urgency, but as well as chasing down witnesses he was to scour a vast warehouse of looted Soviet art works that had been assembled by the Americans at the end of the war. Kuchumov warned the general that his komandirovat was for only one month since he was needed at the Central Stores in Leningrad, which was still receiving a constant flow of treasures. The general replied that a month was probably enough to trace the Amber Room.
'Taken down to the banks of the Spree by the general,' wrote Kuchumov. 'In the east harbour was a long, grey building of sombre stone, at least a third of a mile of it.' The gigantic riverside property was the warehouse known as the Derutra building. The Deutsch-Russische Transport-Aktiengesellschaft (German-Russian Storage and Transport Association) had been formed in the 1920S. The general, Kuchumov and Comrade Antipin unlocked the huge steel doors. 'Believe me, we could not trust our own thoughts,' Kuchumov wrote.
Here the notes have been annotated at a later date. Kuchumov has copied down Comrade Antipin's first impressions of the warehouse:
Enormous heaps of pictures in frames and rolled canvases. Can you imagine it? Icons, wood and marble sculpture, manuscripts and books, ceramics, tapestries and carpets, glass, porcelain, drawing and ancient arms, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of exhibits from museums in Kiev, Minsk, Pskov, Novgorod, Kirch, Pavlovsk and Pushkin. Dizzying all of it. Dizzying.10
The building was filled with dismembered Soviet collections that had been stolen by the Nazis and hidden all over the Third Reich. Kuchumov was told that the majority of these works had been found by US troops and transferred to Berlin from US Army collection points in Munich and Wiesbaden,